


Fault Lines

by IamShadow21



Series: Shift 'verse [2]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Acceptance, Alive Ianto Jones, Alternate Dimension Canon Character, Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Gay Relationship, Children of Earth Compliant, Children of Earth Fix-It, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Not A Fix-It, Not Miracle Day Compliant, POV Ianto Jones, Post-Children of Earth, Taken By The Rift, Timestamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-28
Updated: 2010-01-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 18:33:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto isn't the man everyone thinks he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fault Lines

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel ficlet to [Shift](http://archiveofourown.org/works/865242). It won't make any sense if you haven't read that, so I suggest you read or re-read that first.

Gwen laughs when he parks his new Audi in front of her house.

"I knew it!" she crows. "I knew you wouldn't go for anything different."

He smiles self-deprecatingly and shrugs. "It's a good car," he offers.

Gwen's teasing is fond. "There are other cars in the world, you know."

He doesn't bring up the truth - that he's never owned an Audi in his life.

***

Rhiannon is suspicious, tentative at first, as though he's going to vanish into thin air. Then she has her arms around him and he has a cup of tea in his hands and is parked at her kitchen table, hearing about the ins and outs of the neighbourhood like he never left. Johnny is at work, and Mica and David are at school, but there's someone missing, someone absent.

"Is someone minding the baby?" he asks, unthinkingly, looking about for the high chair, the bouncer, that are conspicuous by their absence.

"Baby?" Rhiannon asks.

"Dylan," he says, and from the look on Rhiannon's face, he knows he's made a terrible error.

Rhiannon takes his hand and breaks it to him gently. "I lost him, love. Stillbirth. The cord got knotted up somehow." She pauses to wipe her eyes. "We didn't try again."

She offers to take him to the gravesite. He declines, as politely as he can, but that night he cries into his pillow for the sunny eighteen month old on the other side of the Rift.

***

When he does visit the graveyard, it's not to see his nephew.

He stares down at his own name, and thinks of the man buried below. No deep freeze for Ianto Jones. No drawer 007, despite the fact that he'd called dibs on it years ago. Just six feet of earth and a satin lined box. How conventional.

He imagines the sunken flesh, the protruding bone structure, the processes of decay and disintegration. The eternal dark and quiet.

He wonders how it's possible to envy a corpse.

"Dying in his arms. How fucking poetic. Couldn't have done it better if you planned it," he spits out bitterly.

He thinks of his own Jack, roaming the galaxy, leaving him behind.

"I hate you, you bastard," he says to the man in the grave.

A slightly hysterical laugh bursts from him at the absurdity of it all. It sounds like a sob.

***

The lines begin to blur. He starts to forget this isn't his world, his place. Out of some desperate desire to preserve his own identity, he writes incessantly. Memories good and bad, sharp and vague. Everything that separates him from the man in the ground, the one who'd done it right.

He's filled three whole journals before he realises what they are; a eulogy. A commemoration of the man he was. The man who lost it all.

When he's crossed the last T and dotted the last I, he buries the journals in a box in his back yard. It's not a refrigerated drawer, but it does have 007 written on the cardboard in Sharpie. 

It's enough.


End file.
